Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Social Justice

My memory is Swiss cheese (with reason)

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I have been trying to find my passport because–well, reasons. I had a dim memory of it being in my underwear drawer and thoroughly dug through it. It was not there. Then, I thought, maybe I put it in a different drawer? I checked all of them. Not there. Hm. Maybe my desk? I had a hazy memory of putting it in my desk drawer, ‘hidden’ in something. Nope. Not there, either. I checked all the drawers several times.

I thought about it for the next few days, and then it hit me. It was probably downstairs in the safe! I went downstairs, but the safe was not where it usually was. I was so puzzled until I remembered that my brother and I had put it in one of the many boxes on the floor (mostly filled with books). I opened all the boxes, rummaging through them. I could not find the safe. I went through all of them again, and I still could not find the safe.

I called my brother to ask him if he remembered putting the safe into one of the boxes. He said yes. He said we did not bury it in anything, either. I went back down to look yet again, but I could not find it.

I was so frustrated and mad as hell. Mostly at myself! I know that my memory is shit since my medical crisis. I’m not mad at losing my memory because it’s a trade-off I’m willing to make for regaining my life. Easy choice, right?

I compensate by writing shit down if I need to do something or be somewhere at some point in time. However, I have not trained my brain yet that I also need to write down shit like this. Though, to be fair to me, I hid my passport before the medical crisis.

I did know that I had a valid passport in 2018 when I went to Malta. I vaguely remembered that it was new, but I wasn’t sure about that. I hadn’t used it for several years before that, and it’s not something I have to think about in my day-to-day.

I was frustrated, but I didn’t think anything would be helped by me going through the boxes for a fourth time.

My brother was in the neighborhood tonight (kind of ), so he stopped by. I haven’t seen him in a hot sec because he’s been busy, busy, busy–which is his standard MO. We got to talking aabout my passport and my frustrations with not being able to find it. My brother being who he is said immediately, “Want to go look for it?”


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Health in relation to identity

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Here’s the thing I learned from my debacle about not wanting/not having children. And this took me a decade into my thirties at least to fully suss out. I had no idea why women would be angry at me for not wanting children and being vocal about it. It’s beacuse they had bought into the societal message that they were supposed to have children and they could not tolerate anybody who indicated the lie in that statement. Because if they did,, then they would have to examine the choices they had made in their life. And they did not want to do that. Oh, they did not want to do that.

I must stress as I always do that I did not crow about it or say that anyone who wanted/had children were stupid/ignorant/out-of-pocket or anything like that. I never brought it up because I didn’t think about it except when people asked me about it. I used to explain it like this. I would never bring up not not having a dog because it was not a part of my life. Same with kids. I would never bring them up because I didn’t have them, didn’t want them, and did not have them as a part of my life.

Anyway. I was not ashamed of not having kids nor for not wanting them. I did not apologize or act as if it was a failing on my part. Because it wasn’t. That was my first step to distancing myself from being a woman, though I did not yet know it. If I was going to get so much shit from not doing my womanly duty (including from my mother, oh so much so), then I did not want to be a woman.

The bra thing is the same. Here’s my post from yesterday. Most women/AFAB people do not like wearing bras. Many wear them simply because they’re supposed to.. It’s a societal expectation, and when some people opt out, it triggers the crabs in a bucket mentality/martyr complex in others. “If I have to suffer, so do you!” It’s a terrible way to live life, but many people have that mentality.

So these oh-so-feminist and progressive women could not explain why they were so upset that some women and AFAB people did not want to wear bras. But even more so, they were upset that we weren’t apologetic about it. There were a half-dozen other women/AFAB people who unabashedly declared they would never wear a bra again without a hint of apologia in their statements.

And some women got so mad. SO MAD. Like, you would have thought we came and took their bras so they couldn’t wear them, mad. Just for saying we preferred not to wear bras or wouldn’t wear them.


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Random musings, part deux

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I was talking about dating in yesterday’s post. Kind of. As with everything in my life, it’s much more complicated than just do I want to date or not? Because yes, I do, but also, no, I do not. Or rather, I do, but I’m not sure I want to go through all the pain and angst to do it.

This is how my brain works. Basic thought: I want to date/have sex.  Tandem thought: I do not want to have anything to do with Trump supporters. Tertiary thought: I hope they all suffer from whatever the next four years bring. Quaternary thought: Shit. That means people I love will probably suffer as much if not more. Then my brain is off to the races, and I’m no longer thinking about dating.

It’s because I’m probably neurodivergent. I have not had that tested and/or confirmed, but at my ripe old age of 53, I am fairly certain I have one kind of neurodivergency, if not more. It’s been a relief to realize that because it means that my brain isn’t broken the way I have always thought it was.

I could go deeper into the weeds, but I shall not. I want to get back to dating.

When I was in my mid-to-late twenties, I used to do the personals for dating. At the time, the biggest ones pused were Plenty of Fish and Craigslist. Both of which were like dating in the Wild West. No quality control, no options other than what was on the front page, and just a bunch of ugh. It was discouraging because as soon as I said I was Asian, that was all the responders focused on. This was in the category of W4M, which was what I was looking for at the time. Well, I also had an ad in the W4W, but I did not get any answers for that ad.  I don’t want to get into why I think that is.

I cannot tell you how many guys told me how much they loooooved Asian woman and sent me dick pics, even though I was very explicit about not wanting either. Worse, at that time, most of them said they loved ‘Oriental girls’, which was a sure way of making sure you would never get a piece of this ass.

That was a quarter of a century ago. I am even more strident about what I want and don’t want now. No straight men, especially white men. Does that cut out a huge portion of potential dates? Yup. Do I care? Nope.


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Random musings for the hell of it

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Checking in with my feelings.

*Several seconds of internal checking*

Yep, still furious. And with the news as to who Trump is going to appoint when he’s president, scared as fuck. Again, not necessarily for myself as I have options, but for all the people who will be hurt by the upcoming administration.

I don’t want to talk about that, thoughh, because I don’t need that agitas in my heart right now. I want to talk about something related, though, and that’s what I plan to do if I start to date again. It’s tangentially related because there is a bit of politics in it, but it’s more about what I want for my future. If there is a future.

My brother was just here, and we talked at length about what the fuck is wrong with America right now. Or rather, in general. I don’t want to get into it, but we’re pretty much on the same page.

Back to the point at hand. I don’t know if I want to keep living in this country. I know that’s a very privileged point of view, but it’s painful to live in a country that hates me. I mean, I’ve been doing it my whole life, but this election made it painfully clear how hated I am. Not me in particluar, maybe, but people of my ilk.

The sad thing is that if you talked to many of the people who voted for Trump, I’m sure they’d say that they voted for him despite his repugnant stances (suuuuuuuure) and that they voted for him because of his business acumen (what??). The thing is, though, that the fact that they could brush off the repugnant viewpoints says a lot about them. They don’t think they’ll be affected by his hate, but they will. Trump doesn’t care about any of them. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. Hell, I would say he doesn’t actually care about himself, either.

Anyway. I am not here to talk about that directly. I’m here to talk about dating/sexing. I am not sure I want to do the former, but I’m pretty sure I want to do the latter. As I’ve said in recent posts, though, I do not want to hook up with cishet dudes, specifically cishet white dudes. They are the reason we are in this mess, and I have no desire to weed out the good ones from the get-the-fuck-away-from me ones. I just don’t.


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Vengeance shall be mine

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I’m so fucking furious.

I did not come back to life for this bullshit!

In my past few posts, I’ve been fairly measured about my anger. Yes, I’m angry and talked at length about it, but not in an inflammatory way. I also talked about my sadness and what I’m doing to self-soothe. And, weirdly enough, a lengthy detour into The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.

Seriously. I can talk for days about Agatha Christie and my love of obsession with Poirot, even though it’s been shoved into the background for some time. I have read every Poirot novel/short story at least twice if not a dozen times. My favorite is The Big Four with Curtain (the last Poirot case) being a very close second. By the way, while I love David Suchet as Poirot (I mean, a lot. So much). He is the quintessential Poirot, and I don’t think we need another (yes, I’m looking at you, Branagh).

Side note: (Yes, really!) The only new Poirot I would want is a young Poirot, played by a Belgian, when he was in the Belgium police force. We have seen Poirot in England enough, especially as portrayed by British dudes.

I have analyzed Poirot novels, talking about what I love and don’t love about it. I have dissected all the isms I’ve seen in the novels (racism, sexism, classism, etc. Not a lot of overt homophobia, but mostly because queerness was not even acknowledged at that time. Short version) because yes, the novels/stories are in a time that is very different than ours, but that does not mean we have to overlook those issues. I can enjoy the stories AND wince at how Chinese people are portrayed, for example. This is one of my biggest issues with The Big Four. One of the big four is a Chinese man, and the descriptions of Chinese people in this novel is…not great, to say the least.

Side note 2: I really hate what they did with the cinematic version of this novel. They took it in a very weird direction, and, yes, I know the cinematic versions don’t need to adhere to the novels, but this one went way overboard. With most of the movies/episodes, they at least stick loosely to how the story was written. This one starts out that way and then devolves into something that is, as the kids say, a hot mess.

You know, it might be time for anohter read-through of the series. I have had a hard time reading in the past several years, and I think this could jumpstart my reading brain again.

Anyway. I’m into vengeance now. Deeply into vengeance. I am so fucking sick and tired of–well–everything. *gestures impotently at the world around me*


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How to self-soothe on a hard, painful day

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We’re fucked.

America is fucked, I mean.

We’ve had (arguably) our good days, but those are behind us now.

The divide is growing day by day, and we should not be a country, anyway. We are fifty different mini-countries, and even within each state, there are vast differences. In Minnesota, for example, the Twin Cities are extremely blue as is the suburb in which I live. There are a sprinkle of other cities that are blue, too, but everywhere else is red. Are red? Not blue, in any case. This is the case in may states around the country.

Trump as a candidate has exposed the lie that is our democratic system. Presidents have very little actual accountability, and they are held in line mostly by social construct and pressure.

I’m so tired. I have said in the past that I did not come back from the dead (twice) to deal with this bullshit. It’s also really hard for me to swallow that a hefty portion of the country I live in wants me dead or to put it more mildly, to disappear. Or for me to change who I am.

I’m incredibly ‘lucky’in that I can hide some of the things about myself that would make me a target and the other ones aren’t as, ah, problematic as some others. Me being Asian? Probably not that dangerous, especially as I was born here. I do get mistaken for Chinese, which can be bad or good, depending. I can let my gender slide and not make it a big deal. I don’t have to deal with my lack of religion being an issue, either. I don’t live in an area that will punish you for that, thankfully.

I can mask, is what I’m sayying. I’m close to not having to care about abortion for myself (going through menopause, and I think I’m at the late stages of it). Yes, I’m trying to find the silver lining in a very dark cloud. The problem is that when I look at the bigger picture, it’s pretty grim. All the sensible Republicans have left the party, and I don’t blame them. The problem is that many of them did not cross the aisle, but just remained in the land of ‘undecided’.

I’m so depressed right now. not just depressed, but also incandescently angry. What the fuck is wrong with this country? That’s partly rhetorical, but it’s also a pain that hits me deep in my solar plexus. I know that I’m an outsider. I know that I’m not wanted. But to have it slapped in my face so brutally was not what I needed nor wanted.

We’ve broken the social contract. You know the one. It’s the contract that says we pretend to get along with each other and not notice (again, pretending) when someone commited a faux pas. I’m not saying those were good times (they weren’t), but tehy were at least tolerable times.


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Voting Day–we need to change things

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As I’m writing this, it’s voting day here in America. It’s been a particularly contentious election year, even more so than the last two. And, yes, there is a reason for that. I may or may not get into that later.

Before I get into the litany of reasons I am so frustrated with the state of politics in Ameria, let me say the one positive. I was stoked to vote for the first African American/South Asian American woman to run for president. I did not think I’d see it in my lifetime. And I’m happy to vote for Coach Walz for VP as well.

Other than that, though, it’s all bullshit.

First of all, America should not be a country. We are just too big and disaparate to operate as one entity. Secondly, we gave way too much power to the Southern states in order to entice them to give up slavery. In addition, the president can get away with anything short of murder (and not even sure about that) because we have set it up so that we take it on faith that the president will do what they think is best for the country and not just for themself.

All that went down the shitter when Trump first ran for president. He didn’t abide by the gentleman’s agreement (hell, he didn’t even know it existed) because he’s incapable of caring for anyone other than himself.

We need some rules, yo. I’ve talked about this with friends and my brother. We can’t just have this unwritten rules bullshit because there will always be someone who will exploit it for their own good–especially now. Trump broke the facade, and we can never go back again. I’m not sure we should.

The problem is that in thinking how to improve things, I got hit with an immediate snag. There should be some qualifications! Well, yes, but what? Maybe that a person had held a position before. Didn’t have to be current, and it didn’t have to be federal, but any position? Was that too elitist? I’m not sure we don’t want to have a baseline for politicians. For some reason, Oprah’s name was floated around. I don’t want her as president! Being immensely likable is not a qualification for being president. For fuck’s sake.

My brother floated IQ. I shot that down. I am also not OK with no felony charge beacuse of how racist and shoddy our police system is. I hope it’s obvious why I’m not for IQ, either.


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A new series called In My Ideal World

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I have a thought running in my mind that I have revisited from time to time. It’s about how I would like things to be in my ideal world which is very different from how things are actually happening in this world. In the RKG Discord, there are two other people who identify as agender, much to my surprise and delight. There was a discussion happening about gender, and I said I could write a 5,000-word treatise on how I realized I was agender. One of them stated interest in reading said treatise if I ever wrote it, and that’s what cemented this series of posts in my mind.

Even stating the paragraph above, I feel an immediate impulse to explain myself. I didn’t realize I was agender so much as I realized that I didn’t care about gender. That the more I thought about it, the more I got confused about it. How if I had thouught about it thirty years ago, I probably would have called myself nonbinary and been done with it.

Now, however, it doesn’t fit any better than any other gender does. And I would love to explain why that is and how it’s not so much that I chose agender as much as I rejected all the other labels. Which is how I work in general. Nothing fits, so I choose the label that least doesn’t fit. Or to put it another way, I choose the label that fits the least worst.

I’ve had this issue with many different aspects of my being, and I would love to delve more deeply and thoroughly in each of them. Those would be religion (areligious), sexuality (bisexual), and gender (agender). I have thought about each of them quite a bit, and in the end, I threw up my hands and said, “That’s good enough.”

I get frustrated because I think so hard about each of these issues. With religioun, it was pretty easy for me to say that I wasn’t religious, but to which degree? I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I can say for sure there’s nothing out there. Plus, it’s hard to believe there’s absolutely nothing when the fact that humans exist speak to the contrary.

I believe there’s some kind of greater being/entity/collective, but–and I’m going to leave that there because this post is about the structure of the series, not delving into the isuses themselves. Consider that a teaser of things to come.


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Me as a cohesive whole

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In the last post, I was talking about how different parts of myself can’t be compartmentalized. I also mentioned that I was a socialist and an anarchist, but those aren’t separate things. I’m also a pragmatic capitalist. And yes, I made up that term just now. What I mean by it is that I acknowledge that people want to make money. People want to thrive, and I have no problems with that. What I do have a problem with is not making sure that everyone is able to survive.

Look. I take this as a basic requirement for being a part of a society. As a collective, we should do what we can for every individual of said collective. I know this is not something all Americans believe (or even most?), but it’s at the very core of my own beliefs. Which is why I identify as a socialist. But, I also know that people need to be allowed to shine at different levels, which is the pragmatic/capitalistic part of me.

As for the anarchist, one reason I didn’t consider it is because I do believe in a (limited) hierarchy and (limited) government. I truly don’t think we could get any shit done as individuals without anybody in charge/leading. It’s hard enough when it’s just a bunch of friends trying to figure out where to go on a Friday night. If one person doesn’t take the lead, no one is going anywhere.

To me, it seems pretty simple that a society/community has a responsibility to all the members of the community to ensure that they have shelter, food, and an access to healthcare. I have explained before that when it comes to healthcare, I think everyone should have basic coverage. No one should go bankrupt or lose their home because they have to go to the hospital. Everyone should be able to go to the doctor once a year. At the bare minimum.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask, honestly. In America, any time someone wants to grouse about paying for this and that (with taxes), my retort is and will always be, “If we cut a billion dollars from the defense budget, we could cover everything else.” I’ve felt this way for decades, and you cannot dissuade me from this position. We spend the most for defense, no matter how you look at it. $900+ billion, which is three times the amount that China spends. It’s 3.4% of our GDP whereas China’s is 1.7% of their GDP. Russia is third with $109 billion, which is 5.9% of their GDP.

You’re telling me we can’t cut a measly billion dollars from that? I don’t buy it, and I never will. EVER.

Back to anarchy.

I am not a strict anarchist as I’ve mentioned. Honestly, I’m too much of a minority to be one of those. Sad, but true. If no one was in charge, people like me would be the first to go. Not to say we’re not, anyway, but I give us a better chance of surviving with a good government in place. Do I like that? No. Would I prefer not to have a government/hierarchy? Yes.


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Excited for the first time in 12 years, part two

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One of my biggest complaints about Democrats is that they won’t take a stand for what they believe in. The party, I mean. They water it down or equivocate or try to make it as palatable as possible. They try to appeal to everyone, and it doesn’t appeal to anyone. I have never felt wanted as a Democrat. I felt taken for granted beacuse, well, I was NOT going to vote for a Republican. I was resentful of that. I only felt good voting for Barack Obama, and less so the second time than the first. Not beacuse he did anything wrong, but just because it’s impossible to sustain that kind of high.

Every election before that and since, I have dutifully done my duty. I have voted in every election I could, but I have not had any joy in doing so. The only time I ever felt seen was when Barack Obama ran as a candidate the first time because he mentioned Asian people and nonreligious people. Once he was elected, he actually said ‘bisexual’. Out loud! It may seem trivial, but it’s such a big thing when your entire identity is ignored in every other aspect of politics/media.

I have felt taken for granted for most of my life (politically) because I don’t really have a choice. It’s Democrats or nothing, but it’s always feels like the lesser of two evils. In 2008, I went into the primaries equally open to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I was excited to have a female candidate and a black candidate, both of whom were more than qualified to be president.

Over the next month, I listened to and read everything each had to say. Obama won me over; it’s as simple as that. In part, it’s because he’s such a fantastic speaker, but it’s also because his policies were more aligned with my own. Clinton, for better and for worse, was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. She embodied the Democartic Party whereas Obama was the fresh-faced kid who exuded hope and new ideas.

By the way, he’s a moderate. I mean, he’s progressive in ideas, but a moderate in practice because he’s pragmatic (and a black man in the United States). But he spoke with such passion and constantly appealed to people’s better nature.  He believed in the best of us (or at least convincingly conveyed that he did), and it was infectious.


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